


callous callis

by TheOtherBookwormFanperson



Series: Graceless [2]
Category: American Idiot - All Media Types, American Idiot - Green Day/Armstrong, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Backstory, Childhood Trauma, Fire, Gen, Genderbending, L i s t e n she's doing her best :(, Minor Character Death, Post-Canon, Religion, Self-Destructive Tendencies, Takes Place Before Graceless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-02 23:18:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14555736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOtherBookwormFanperson/pseuds/TheOtherBookwormFanperson
Summary: Cy's pain was real, she reasoned. Cy had a leg to worry about, and had been hurt emotionally by their parents' deaths. And her other bandmates, Tabby, Jimmy, Marie... They all had their own problems, each worse than the last. So really, Esperocallis had nothing to complain about.





	callous callis

**Author's Note:**

> heed tags!! most are very quickly passed over but the alcohol is the main body of this story so!! yeah!! take care!!

Everyone thought- no, everyone  _ knew _ , Esperocallis was doing good, better than the rest of the Aftermath. Cal knew it as well as anyone.

Her baby sister, Cipher, had taken their parents' death hard. She'd been there, and remembered. Of course, Cal hadn't forgotten, nor could she ever forget the harsh scent of her home going up in flames. But by the tender age of 14 she'd already learned not to let things get the better of her. She’d tried to move on after only a few minutes, shutting down her emotions and projecting a put-together, accepting facade.

Cy had been even younger than her. Little ten-year-old Chi, coughing in the ashy air, grabbing her hand and asking where Momma and Dad were. She hadn’t known what to say. Privately, she worried that her lack of reassurance had inadvertently led to Cy’s intense fear of fire, or the way she constantly seemed to isolate herself.

Jimmy, well. Jimmy was Jimmy. He practically  _ relished _ in pain, the sort of way one relishes the only life they've ever known. He lay in the sun until his skin burned and cracked, and turned blueish from all the aloe he needed to soak in. When he fronted during gigs, he sang hard enough to scratch up his throat, and no matter how much pain he put himself through, he refused to let anyone reach out to him, lashing out at anyone who dared to  _ breathe _ in the same Zone as he did.

Tabby came off almost okay, usually, but her marble image always had cracks- like when you go to use the bathroom and find her in the midst of crying silently, or get up in the middle of the night to make some coffee only to find her sitting in the common, clutching her rosary hard enough to nearly break skin. She never quite got  _ used _ to living in a human body, she confided to Cal once. Whenever she fronted, she kept twitching her shoulders or falling off-balance, expecting her wings to unfold and stretch, keep her stable, give her an inch of freedom.

And poor Marie... Marie tried her best. She hated the way Jimmy treated the body, how he never listened to her. To feel like she had at least  _ some _  shred of control, she had a habit of writing everything in her journal. When her words got to be too much even for the pages, she ripped them out of her mind, her pen, or her journal, struck a match, and watched the confusion and helplessness in her life blow away in a cloud of ash. Until the cinders crept too close to her fingers and she would have to toss it to the floor, stamping it out and sucking on her singed fingers.

In comparison to her bandmates- Cy's dissociation and breakdowns, Jimmy's self-destructiveness, Tabby's feeling of constant wrongness, and Marie's helpless efforts to have a bearable life- Esper honestly had nothing to complain about. Her friends, on their bad nights, often told her they wished they could be her. Nothing appeared to shake her.

If only it were true.

She sighed, emptying another shot. She had left a note at the van, claiming to be scouting out new venues for gigs. Instead, she'd made her way to old Goldilocks's bar in Zone 5 and asked for a Bloody Party... four hours ago.

She wasn't exactly a vocal drunk. She hardly did anything when she was drunk, in fact.

She only ordered another bottle of beer. Changed her mind to whiskey. Changed her mind again, ending up ordering both and sipping mindlessly while staring into empty space, half-listening to the stereo music pumping into the room.

"Rough night, Cal?" Goldie chirped, dusting bootprints off the counter. Cal had become a fairly regular customer at the bar, which had survived for over a decade. It was said that Goldie had known the Four before they were ghosted. Cal didn’t care about history at the moment, though, she just wanted her head to stop.

"Mnh." Cal took another sip from her beer. Words were complicated. Nearly as complicated as thoughts. Memories. Emotions. So she didn't use any. She just kept drinking and tried not to think about the inevitable hangover which would take days to pass, or the look on her sister's face when she eventually would get back.

Probably Jimmy, Marie, Tabby, and the rest thought she would go to bars to party the night away, taking right after the famous Poison. They hadn't known her for long, and not very well. They trusted her, of course, and she cared about them, but. Well. Sharing her thoughts meant mutual trust, which meant vulnerability. So she kept drinking, and listening to the radio because nothing better was on. Probably. She didn't really ask.

Two bottles of beer and one and a half of straight vodka later, Goldie cut her off. Some bullshit about health and not dying or getting set on fire. For a while she sat at the bar with her head down, half-asleep, but eventually Goldie's bar closed and she was gently, but insistently, guided out the door.

She wasn't quite sure where the van was, but figured mostly the right direction from an odd-shaped cactus she remembered. She stumbled home, tripping every couple of minutes on the shifting sands, once falling on a low ground cactus. It wasn't much fun.

She eventually found her way to a dune where she could see the van, far away.

She sighed and walked a little longer, but staying up all night took its toll. The sun was about to ignite any hour now, but she figured simply sitting down and taking a short rest couldn't do any harm.

She only let her eyes slip shut for a moment.

Maybe five.

... Hours.

By the time Cy caught wind that her sister must've gone out last night and gone searching, splitting up with Tabby to cover more ground, the sun had been dancing along the neon sky for so long, her hands were spiderwebbed with cracks and her eyes were green-rimmed. Not that they opened of their own accord.

Luckily, Tabby found her before the damage was irreversible.

She woke up in the evening to her baby sister applying another coat of aloe to her hands and face.

"Stupid, idiotic shitbag," Cy muttered to herself.

"L've ya too," Cal huffed through her splitting headache, with effort.

She let herself sleep again, and woke up with a slightly better head.

A jar full of origami flowers, each petal inscribed with either a self-care tip or a message of hope and love in Tabby's telltale handwriting, appeared on her desk in the morning. It sat alongside a sort of squishy stress-ball-type cloth bag full of sand and stitched up, which bore a pattern Cal recognized as being from her parents' tent before it was burned. A few days later, after Jimmy started fronting again, a bottle of aloe Cal remembered seeing in Jimmy's room turned up in her bag while she was packing up to move on to the next gig venue. Two weeks afterward, Marie's lighter found itself in her boot when she woke up sober.

And, exactly one month after the last night she spent in Goldie's bar, she met a girl. A shy, handsome girl, who fiddled with her hair and smiled at her when she didn't think she was looking. And then everything went to shit.

**Author's Note:**

> please comment or leave kudos if you, uh, enjoyed? idk :0 but anyway cal is based on will from AIMusical so I figured I should write about her Coping Mechanisms or lack thereof :0 so that's what this was!! lmk in the comments what you thought and what song is playing right now!!


End file.
